GAIUTRA BAHADUR

By Gaiutra Bahadur
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD – Saddam Hussein’s rules for young and ambitious Iraqis were clear: If you want a future, you must join the Baath Party.Now, as the leaders of the new National Assembly parcel out Cabinet posts according to ethnic group and religious or political affiliation, students and recent college graduates worry that the government will become a collection of fiefdoms in which loyalties matter more than merit.

“I guess now with so many political parties, and the way the different ministries are divided according to sects, one doesn’t know which party he should be a member in,” said Haider Ali, 24. “I will try my luck. If not, I will go abroad to find a job opportunity.”

Ali’s worries are one reflection of the broader problems of making a democratic Iraq a unified nation and creating a national identity that supersedes ethnic and religious allegiances.

The Baghdad resident was part of a garlanded caravan of al-Rafidain college seniors who recently made their way, heads bobbing to Arab pop music, to a graduation party in Baghdad’s Fardos Square. Despite their celebratory mood, several of them expressed anxiety about their career prospects.

They’ve reason to be pessimistic. Half of Iraqis are unemployed or underemployed, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and recent college graduates already have been backed into jobs they think are beneath them.

An electrical engineer works in a plastics factory. A woman with a degree in business administration sews clothes to make ends meet. A would-be English teacher has cleaned streets.

They’d all like jobs in the government, which employed most Iraqis under Saddam and is now the homegrown employer with the greatest stability and highest salaries. They complain that they’ve lost out in the competition for government positions because they haven’t paid bribes or don’t belong to the right political parties or ethnic groups.

Parties mostly break down along ethnic lines, with Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds forming their own blocs in the National Assembly. Iraq’s newly selected leaders have said they’ll divide 31 Cabinet posts among those three major groups based on their numbers in parliament.

That’s bad news for Sunni job seekers: Sunnis overwhelmingly stayed home from the polls in January’s elections and hold only 17 assembly seats.

Students and job seekers swap tales of friends who were told by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to produce letters of recommendation from the Kurdish Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Kurdish leader Hoshyar Zebari runs the foreign ministry, which resonates with the sounds of Kurdish rather than Arabic. He’s likely to retain the post.

“We know that ministry is for the Kurdish party,” said Kareem al-Saadi, 22, a graduating senior at Mustansiriyah University. “When you want to have a job in this ministry, you must get a notification from the Kurdish party.” Al-Saadi said it happened in all the ministries.

Hamid al-Bayati, a deputy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said political parties had recommended candidates for diplomatic posts but he maintained that the ministry hasn’t become a stronghold for any one group.

The hiring committee relies on the parties to know who is “trustworthy,” he said, because “the last thing we want is infiltration from loyalists of the former regime.”

“We try to make it a mix to satisfy all sectors of Iraqi society,” said al-Bayati, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major Shiite party. “We always make sure there are Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. And we receive nominations from all different groups.”

Still, perceptions of bias run deep.

“The Ministry of Defense is just for those named Shaalan. Health is just for the Dawa party,” said Mazen Abd Sadr Mohamed al-Jorani, the would-be English teacher. “I must either get relations or dollars.”

In December, an internal auditor found that Health Ministry officials had hired widely on the basis of family, tribal or party ties. Adil Mohsen Abdullah, who was fired last month after making his report public, said there were thousands of unqualified employees throughout the ministry.

“Health is a technical field which needs experts to fill the proper positions,” he said in an interview. “And if we keep turning to the tribe or the family, we’ll give these posts to the nonqualified people who don’t deserve it.”

The Commission on Public Integrity, which American administrators created as a watchdog against corruption before they stepped aside last year, has received complaints about government jobs being handed out on the basis of ethnicity or membership in political parties. It hasn’t been able to act on the complaints, however.

“The people who complain do not assist us in our investigations because of the security situation,” said Judge Radhi Hamdan Radhi, the head of the commission. “They fear revenge if their identity is revealed.”

The Labor Ministry runs a center that’s supposed to serve – by a resolution of the interim government – as a clearinghouse for government workers, using a database of 650,000 unemployed doctors, engineers, teachers and others.

“They should come to us,” said Riyadh Hassan, the head of the center. But “there is not complete control. We send them all our lists and their qualifications, and (they say), `We are sorry. We haven’t a job.’ Then we find in the papers thousands of teachers have been hired. They’ve directly employed them.”

“Sometimes, it’s personal,” he said. “Sometimes a person would bring his own people, or his acquaintances, or maybe take money.”

Ali Jamil Haleel, a 25-year old waiter with a bachelor’s degree in history, founded the General Union of Graduated Students about six months ago to help jobless degree-holders. He said many of them had encountered partisanship.

“Students graduate from a certain branch and want to apply to the suitable ministry. The dominant party would ask for a recommendation from that party,” Haleel said.

He said Saddam started the practice of favoritism. “So this thing was planted in people’s minds,” he said. “So now the parties are acting in the same way. Each party is trying to bring the people of its own sect to its side.”

International observers also are worried.

“Sooner or later, this is going to create resentment and tension,” said Marina Ottaway, a democracy and Middle East specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

© Knight Ridder. All rights reserved.

They are running and rejected.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

BAGHDAD – Alyaa said she was the first woman in her neighborhood to sign up to work with the U.S. government after Saddam Hussein fell.
She used to stand shoulder to shoulder with an American soldier in front of the U.S. military’s Camp Scania in the Rashid section of Baghdad. A translator, Alyaa, 24, talked to Iraqis who lined up at the entrance seeking compensation for dead relatives and destroyed homes.

Now, because of that work, her life is in danger and in limbo.

Alyaa, who asked that her last name be withheld out of fear for her safety, fled to Jordan with her cousin Shaimaa after insurgents killed an uncle and kidnapped Shaimaa and another cousin. Alyaa had hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered that the State Department was not resettling refugees from Iraq.

She has lost her faith in the country she once loved.

“We gave them our friendship,” jeans-clad, cigarette-smoking Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant. “We gave them our hard work. And they don’t even help us to have a new life.”

Would it be so hard, she asked, “for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?”

Refugee aid workers and U.S. and U.N. officials said the United States had turned away Iraqi refugees because it was trying instead to create a democratic society from which no one had to flee and was sacrificing American lives in the process. To succeed, it needs the talents of the very people who want to leave.

“The whole purpose of being here is to create an environment of stability and security so that’s not an issue,” said Joanne Cummings, refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Cummings said the embassy valued people who had put themselves at risk and kept a close watch on them.

More than 700,000 Iraqi refugees live in Jordan and Syria; 15,000 of them arrived in Amman after the American invasion two years ago, according to the U.N. refugee office. They include religious minorities, doctors, and other professionals who fear being kidnapped for ransom, and a growing number of Iraqis who were threatened because of their work with the U.S. government and its contractors.

Nongovernmental organizations first became aware of the problem as U.S. soldiers approached them for help in getting their translators out of the country, only to be told it was impossible.

In Alyaa and Shaimaa’s case, the soldier was Army Capt. Patrick J. Murphy of the 82d Airborne Division, their supervisor and an Iraq war veteran who is a Philadelphia lawyer.

“They fought just as bravely as we did over there, and I think we owe it to them as a grateful nation to do everything we can to help them become Americans,” Murphy said.

So many former employees have sought protection in other countries that the U.N. refugee office recently rewrote its guidelines for Iraq to include those ties as reasonable grounds for fear of persecution, said Marie Helene Verney, a spokeswoman for the agency in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Such people should be of special humanitarian concern to the U.S.,” Bill Frelick, director of refugee programs for the human-rights group Amnesty International, wrote in a letter to U.S. officials in February.

“In principle, there is no blunt refusal,” said Verney, the U.N. spokeswoman. “The few cases in the pipeline are taking a long time.”

The threats against Alyaa and her family came in June in sealed envelopes delivered to their homes in Dora, a Baghdad neighborhood rife with insurgents. There were six letters, one for each member of the family who was working for the United States.

“You help the people you’re supposed to fight,” Alyaa said they read. “You deserve death.”

The letters, signed by a group calling itself the Jihad Units, instructed the family to post signs at the local mosque within three days saying they had quit their jobs – or face beheading. But before the deadline passed, her uncle, a construction contractor for the United States, was ambushed on his way to work and shot in the heart.

The slaying sent the family scattering. Alyaa went into hiding, hopscotching from house to house and finally fleeing north. While she was away, a gang of men kidnapped two female cousins, the ones whose father had just been killed.

They held one of them – Shaimaa, 26, who also had worked at Camp Scania – for six weeks in a one-room mud house near Ramadi that served as a weapons storehouse. The other cousin was released after a week with a ransom demand.

Shaimaa said the men had taunted her with specific details about the young women’s friendships with soldiers at the base. They disparaged Alyaa, asking Shaimaa whether Alyaa had made love to a captain when she worked behind closed doors with him. And they killed Shaimaa’s fiancee while they held her captive.

The family sold their properties to pay $60,000 for Shaimaa’s release. She emerged “almost crazy,” Alyaa said. For a long time after her release, Shaimaa would not sit in the same room with her brother or watch television because her abductors believed it was un-Islamic to do so.

She still has dark bruises on her right forearm and incisions in the nails of both middle fingers where the insurgents attached cables to administer electric shocks. And she still awakes crying from nightmares.

The cousins flew to Amman in December. They joined a community of Iraqi expatriates that has swollen to such a degree that one commercial road in the Jordanian capital has been nicknamed Tigris and Euphrates Street for the two rivers that flow through Iraq to the Persian Gulf.

The influx has inflated real estate prices and tightened the job market, leading the Jordanian government to crack down. Iraqis can’t work or study there. And they can’t live there continuously for more than three months unless they have hefty deposits in Jordanian banks, because every day they stay beyond that means a fine.

Alyaa and Shaimaa registered as refugees with the U.N. office in Amman but returned to Baghdad in frustration in early April as their three months came to a close. “I cannot stay in Baghdad,” Alyaa said. “I cannot go to another country. I cannot stay in Jordan.”

Even advocates who are urging the United States to offer sanctuary to former workers recognize the challenges that a formal refugee program would pose.

“It’s a really tough thing,” said Amnesty International’s Frelick. “If you let all the interpreters leave the country, then what are you going to do? . . . If we start evacuating Iraqis because it’s too unsafe for them there, is that going to create a backlash in the U.S at a time when we’re sending U.S. soldiers to Iraq and they’re dying?”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Self-sufficiency is a stance as deeply rooted in India as its fight to cast off its colonizers. Mahatma Gandhi wore only khadi, or homespun cloth. The gesture, tied to a boycott of textiles made in Britain, signified that the country did not want to – nor did it have to – rely on foreign masters. Independent India banned Coca-Cola for more than a decade, drinking the homegrown Thums Up, instead.

So Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s declaration after the December tsunami that India could handle its immediate disaster-relief efforts on its own was not out of character.

Though this inward instinct has begun to slacken in the last decade, the idea that “we are capable of handling our own affairs is still there, and India wants to demonstrate that it is indeed capable,” said Gautam Adhikari, a former executive editor of one of India’s most widely circulated English dailies, the Times of India, and now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The rejection of help from other governments points to India’s bid to be the predominant power in the region and a player on the world stage. And, unlike other countries in the tsunami disaster zone, India has resources to marshal for its own relief efforts.

What’s more, it is eager to show that it can help other affected countries. It is one of Sri Lanka’s largest relief funders and has sent troops to the island nation to help distribute aid. India, with an economic growth rate second only to China’s, also finds itself in the company of the industrialized First World as the only developing nation on the committee coordinating disaster relief in the region. (The others are the United States, Japan and Australia.)

“That’s an important thing for India… to be involved as sort of an equal partner in that,” said writer Mira Kamdar, an expert on U.S.-India relations and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. “They have real capabilities there. It’s not like they [First World nations] are doing some sort of favor by letting them into this club.”

India’s position on aid from foreign governments “is a signal of its notion of itself as a player rather than a victim,” she said. “India has ambitions to play this kind of a role, and it is in fact starting to play this role. It’s not just a fantasy.”

Still, India’s response to the disaster will be a significant test for a country that wants a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and, more generally in world affairs, one at the grown-ups’ table.

The tsunami’s death toll in India was 10,000; many thousands more lost their livelihoods, and property damage was $1.5 billion. Though the government intends to handle immediate relief itself, it has tacitly acknowledged that it could use some help for the longer term.

On Tuesday, the government approached the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank for financial assistance for such projects as rebuilding roads and helping fishermen who lost boats to devise a way to make a living.

This can be viewed as a relatively minor call for outside assistance. India’s needs are small when set against the scale of loss in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and the strength of its liberalized and increasingly tech-driven economy. (India not only drinks Coca-Cola now, the government also welcomes the multinationals and the likes of Microsoft on its soil.)

Along with new levels of prosperity, India notably possesses a significant infrastructure for dealing with the aftermath of nature’s wrath. Calamities – drought, floods, earthquakes, tidal waves – come India’s way with a relentlessness that is almost rhythmic. “Every year, there is something or the other happening,” said Adhikari of the American Enterprise Institute. “So, there’s experience.”

The government runs institutes such as the Center for Disaster Management, which offers courses for civil servants of nearly every stripe, from police officers to forestry bureaucrats. The Famine Relief Handbook is a well-thumbed resource for Indian administrators. Every district collector studies it and knows it.

“They’ve been handling famines effectively since the 19th century,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of a book about Indian disaster relief published in the 1970s.

Also, thousands of nongovernmental organizations are at work in India. Most are locally grown, though international agencies such as Oxfam also have branches there.

The opening of the Indian economy has enhanced the country’s ability to stand on its own. So has its export of a chief asset: its most skilled and well-educated people. Every year, millions in charitable donations flow homeward from Indians abroad. Their investments in the Indian economy, factoring in remittances, venture capital, and foreign-exchange deposits, are in the billions, according to investment firm Goldman Sachs.

India is also trying to tap into the wealth of its diaspora, the second-largest worldwide, at 20 million people. The country, eloquently, has a Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs.

Fortuitously, earlier this month Bombay hosted the third annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, or Festival of Indians Abroad, a four-day gathering of 1,400 prominent expatriates. The government honored 15 of them, including a quartet of Americans: filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, Silicon Valley telecommunications guru Sam Pitroda, economist Jagdish Bhagwati, and political scientist Sunil Khilnani. (Shyamalan, who lives in Gladwyne, did not attend.)

More than accolades was on the agenda. At the last minute, organizers added a special plenary session titled “Disaster Management Reconstruction and Rehabilitation: Role of Overseas Indians.” Many of those present pledged contributions to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. And India’s President Abdul Kalam asked them to raise $100 million to set up and endow a foundation for earthquake research.

India’s ability to manage its post-tsunami recovery does not diminish one of the problems that has long plagued the country: sectarianism. Nongovernmental organization personnel working with the coastal communities in Tamil Nadu, the most severely hit state, have heard complaints about discrimination against lower-caste groups in the distribution of aid.

Walter Andersen, a South Asia scholar who was vacationing along the Sri Lankan coast when the tsunami flooded the first floor of his hotel, attributed the problem in part to local bureaucrats, who are “reluctant to go against local customs, which include caste distinctions.”

Andersen, an associate director of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, supports the premise that India will be able to recover from the tsunami largely on its own. “Whether or not there’s inefficiency or caste prejudices, I don’t think there’s a question of financial resources,” he said. “As far as I know, they don’t need the help.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.